We have today tremendous forces at work driving us toward centralized control, one world government, and perhaps even totalitarianism. These will inevitably collapse, but not before causing great pain and suffering – as always. What can we do to survive? Decentralization and diversity are the keys. To succeed, both are essential. How might this work in practice?
Fragile means easily damaged or broken. Like our world today. Why should this be so? Our world, physically at least, looks pretty sturdy and robust. The problem here is how we define our “world”. Our world in reality consists of a huge number of semi-autonomous complex systems that are deeply interconnected and interdependent – and inherently fragile. Is our world truly survivable?
There definitely seems to be a lot of destruction going on today – in nearly everything and everywhere. Doom and gloom pervades. Is this widely beneficial ‘creative destruction’, or just destruction done in order to acquire power and gains for just a very few? Or something else? The answer I found is far from obvious, and may surprise you.
Emergence occurs where an entity is observed to have properties and behavior that its parts do not have on their own and that emerge only after the parts interact and adapt. The world has recently been undergoing a huge restructuring that creates new groupings, new interactions, and new behaviors. Emerging from this process will almost certainly be a business environment quite unlike anything we have ever experienced. It cannot be predicted.
Disaster in the form of a black swan is quite often the first indication of excess complexity. From a management viewpoint, this is not a good way to find out. Unfortunately, there are not many effective ways to gauge complexity levels. Here are a few ways to deal constructively with largely invisible complexity before it morphs into a black swan event.
